xiii, 495 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : 24 cm

"Eva Braun left her convent school at the age of seventeen and met Hitler a few months later. She became his mistress before she was 20. How did unsophisticated little Fraulein Braun, 23 years his junior, hold the most powerful man in Europe in an exclusive sexual relationship that lasted from 1932 until their joint suicide? Were they really lovers, and what were the background influences and psychological tensions of the middle-class Catholic girl from Munich who shared his intimate life? How can her ordinariness and apparent decency be reconciled with an unshakeable loyalty to the monster she loved? This biography, only the second life of Eva written in English, based on detailed new research, explores how, living at the cold heart of the Nazi leadership, she could have been genuinely ignorant of the atrocities of the Third Reich." "She left almost no personal material or documents but her private diary and photograph albums show that her life with Hitler, far from being a luxurious sinecure, caused her emotional torture. His chauffeur called her 'the unhappiest woman in Germany'. The Fuhrer humiliated her in public while the top Nazis' wives, living in his privileged enclave on a Bavarian mountainside, despised her. Yet Albert Speer said: 'She has been much maligned. She was very shy, modest. A man's woman: gay, gentle and kind; incredibly undemanding ... a restful sort of girl. And her love for Hitler - as she proved in the end - was beyond question'." "Angela Lambert reveals a woman the world never knew until the last twenty-four hours of her life. In the small hours of 29 April 1945, as Allied troops raced to capture Berlin and the bunker below the Reichskanzlei where the defeated Nazi leaders were hiding, Eva Braun finally achieved her life's ambition by becoming Hitler's wife. Next day they both swallowed cyanide and died instantly. She was young, healthy, and thirty-three years old."--Jacket

Includes bibliographical references (pages 470-475) and index

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